Pending the development of reliable voice-responding data entry machines, the bulk of information entered into data processing machines is done by means of keyboards. This process requires the painstaking and time-consuming task of spelling out each word character by character. Substantial progress has been made in the layout of keyboards whereby keys for the most often-used letters of the language are grouped in the most conveniently accessible sections of the keyboard. Yet, even the most dextrous typists can achieve typing speeds of little more than 1.2 words per second. Higher speeds can only be reached through the use of shorthand techniques and machines requiring a second level interpretation.
Persons affected with auditory or speech disability must rely on visual communication devices operated by means of a keyboard. Improvements in this area designed to speed up the entry of information to be visually displayed have for the most part consisted of replacing character keys with descriptive symbols. For instance, the keyboard of such a device would have keys marked with descriptive symbols for items of clothing, bed, drink, food, glasses, etc. Depressing such a key causes a written or pictoral description of the corresponding object to be displayed on a particular readout so that the operator can communicate his needs for these particular objects or services. The communication capability of such machines is severely limited by space restriction in the layout of the keyboard.
Keyboards are also used in non-verbal communication devices such as telexes and electronic language translators.
The advent of micro-electronics has led to the development of hand-held electronic dictionaries by means of which the translation into a selected target foreign language of a word entered in the operator's own language can be quickly obtained. These devices are of limited usefulness in the translation of structured language. Since they can only provide the equivalent foreign term for the word keyed into the machine, they do not provide the morphological and syntactic interpretation required to accurately turn a phrase of the base language into its correct interpretation in the target language. A pocket translator should provide both an efficient keyboard entry procedure as well as a correct grammatical interpretation process.